Victory and Debt tokens punchboard, as found in some European versions.

Debt (represented by the symbol ) is an alternate cost for some cards and Events in Empires. It allows the buyer to take tokens instead of paying the full cost of the card. Players who have tokens may not buy cards, Events, or Projects. tokens can only be removed from a player by paying per token at any point after playing Treasures or spending Coffers tokens during the player's Buy phase, unless otherwise specified (e.g. Capital allows paying off tokens during the Clean-up phase). A player cannot play any more Treasures or spend any more Coin tokens once they have begun to pay off . may not be paid off when Black Market allows you to buy a card from the Black Market deck.

A cost in is orthogonal to a cost in a ; cards with in their cost do not cost less or more than cards with a cost. and are similarly not comparable.

Empires comes with 40 tokens, but the mechanic is not intended to be component-limited.

Official Rules

Empires has Debt tokens. These are indicated with the symbol, usually with a number on it, e.g. .

Having Debt tokens prevents a player from buying cards or Events; Debt tokens do nothing else (for example they have no effect at the end of the game).

Buying a card or Event with in its cost gives the player that many Debt tokens.

A player removes Debt tokens in the player's Buy phase by paying per Debt token to remove it; this is done after playing Treasures, but can be done both before and after buying cards.

Removing Debt does not use up a Buy.

For example, Natalie has and buys City Quarter, which costs . She takes , then immediately pays off with her . She still has . On her next turn, in her Buy phase, she has . She cannot buy any cards; all she can do is pay off , leaving her with . On her next turn, in her Buy phase, she has . She pays off the and has left to spend. She buys an Engineer, taking and immediately paying to get rid of it.

amounts are something different from .

An amount of and is only larger than another if both the and amounts are larger, or one is larger and one the same.

Amounts that do not specify have , and amounts that do not specify have (including all previous Dominion card costs).

Math involving amounts does not affect amounts.

Examples:

is not "up to ." is not more than and is not more than ; both have something the other lacks.

Bridge (from Dominion: Intrigue) lowers the cost of cards by . This lowers Fortune from to , but has no effect on Engineer's cost of .

Patrician checks to see if a card costs " or more." Fortune costs , so it costs " or more." Overlord costs ; that is not " or more."

Debt tokens are not counter-limited; players should use a replacement if they run out.

Possession (from Dominion: Alchemy) now has errata that causes it to also give the Possessing player all tokens the Possessed player would get, which includes Debt tokens.

Trivia

In other languages

Finnish: Velka

Polish: Dług

Preview

Okay so Debt. That reddish hexagon means you don't pay for City Quarter or Royal Blacksmith up front. Instead you take some tokens that say how much you owe. While you have the tokens, you can't buy cards or Events. Those are the only things you can't do; you can still play cards, including the one that got you into Debt if you draw that one; you can still trash cards and get attacked and win the game and so on. You can pay off Debt tokens in your Buy phase, before and/or after buying cards, at per token. So, you have , you buy City Quarter, you get , you pay off of it immediately, you have left. In your next Buy phase, if you had , you could pay off the rest of your and then have left to spend. Get it? It's pretty simple. The one tricky thing is how these things work when cards compare costs. There it works like : apples and oranges. A reddish hexagon with an 8 isn't more or less than . There's a rulebook, okay? It covers all the tricky things. And uh why a hexagon, why that color? The physical tokens are reddish hexagons.

Secret History

I had Debt from the start (and it had been in the ideas file for years). The first version though was a word on cards, "Debt," that meant you didn't need the to buy the card, but went into Debt. The Debt tokens worked the same way as they do now. One day I thought of using a symbol, and the cards changed to things like "When you gain this during your turn, take [red coin with a 10 on it]." They were like that for a while, before finally I put the symbol into the cost. With Debt a significant concern was that you could just buy the card turn one, and if that was good it seemed like the game could be too scripted. So the big Debt cards always tried to not be good turn one, although it took a while to really get there. Originally the cards could all be bought with , and in the end some have costs too.